Roberto Bartholo

Tourism for whom?: Different paths to development and alternative experiments in Brazil

The tourism policies pursued by the Brazilian government since the 1990s have not produced the benefits that were expected from mass tourism. The example of two very successful cases of community-based tourism, stressing paths rooted in a development model that is fair and environmentally responsible, shows that tourism development can improve the quality of life in communities that receive an influx of tourists provided that the local community is taken into account and the planning and implementation of such development focus on creating opportunities and benefits for its members.

Beyond the “deficit discourse”: Mapping ethical consumption discourses in Chile and Brazil

This article challenges the longstanding trend of much empirical material on ethical consumption originating from the global North, offering instead rich data on ethical consumption and practices in Chile and Brazil. Drawing on data generated from 32 in-depth focus groups (179 participants in total) in both countries, the article identifies similarities and differences between these two countries and with the global North. We identify how ethical consumption in Chile and Brazil is conceptualized mainly at two different scales, namely first, the everyday ethics of consumption at household scale and, second, a more global scale of discourse on environmental problems and the negative effects of globalisation. At the household scale, narrative themes include those of prudence, of avoiding overconsumption, family health, and focus on quality. At a more national and international scale, respondents from all classes in both countries discussed labour conditions associated with Chinese imports. Further, particularly university-educated and well-travelled respondents had adopted international environmentalist discourses. Employing a relational geography to discourses, the article calls for research to both include and transcend cross-country comparisons, and binaries of global North and South.

Engineering Brazil: National Engineering Capability at Stake

This presentation of Brazilian engineering sketches its trajectory in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Well into the nineteenth century, engineering was unwelcome in Brazil: its agricultural slaver society had little use for it. Although the oldest engineering school in the Americas was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1792, Brazilian engineering was an unwanted novelty. It took Vargas’ 1930 dictatorship to bring about Brazilian engineering . Engineering in the Brazilian context became more than buildings and machines. It emerged as the core of institutional innovations, as a tool of a national development project. It bloomed in the late 1950s, leading to almost half a century of accelerated industrialization . A peculiarity of this contextualized process was the leading role of graduate studies over undergraduate education, and its emphasis on intervention in Brazilian reality in engineering education. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, a new political coalition seeks to redesign the institutionality of federal universities in Brazil, jeopardizing the future of Brazilian engineering and putting national engineering capability at stake.

The Rise of eTourism for Development

This paper presents the conceptualization of eTourism For Development (eT4D), an emerging and still underexplored field of research. eT4D can be defined as the use of tourism technologies in developing and emerging contexts to foster socio-economic development. eT4D is a new concept that integrates three distinct disciplines: development studies, tourism studies and information and communication technologies. The paper describes and defines the eT4D field from a theoretical point of view. Additionally the research presents an exploratory case study describing current tourism technology usage in a given developing context that is the one of Rocinha, a slum in Rio de Janeiro. Results confirm the theoretical conceptualization of the domain and the need of investigating the eT4D field also from a practical perspective.

Managing the State of the Art of Engineering: Learning from Medicine

This chapter briefly presents the management of the state of the art (sota) in Medicine as a possible learning opportunity for the future of Engineering. Engineering and Medicine are sibling disciplines for intervention in reality, “sciences of the artificial” according to Herbert A. Simon. They seek to enlarge and disseminate their state of the art (sota) for greater scope and effectiveness. Both seek to convert scientific knowledge or technological possibilities into answers and procedures in tune with practical needs. In different ways, each seeks to improve the quality of the data it considers and the rigor of the methods it employs. Medicine has arrived at one striking, unique arrangement to support individual practitioners: a system that collects, classifies and qualifies medical knowledge comprehensively, and culminates with access through Patient-Intervention-Comparison-Outcome (PICO). PICO protocol allows a medical practitioner to access an up to date configuration of the whole of medical knowledge, being available as readily as in a smartphone. The chapter argues for the opportunity, propriety and desirability of translating the PICO experience to Engineering.

Herbert Simon Meets Billy Vaughn Koen and Joan van Aken: From Sciences of the Artificial to Engineering Heuristics and Design Propositions

Herbert Simon’s perception of the fundamental unity of design activities and the associated notion of sciences of the natural and of the artificial are put into dialogue with Billy Vaughn Koen and Joan van Aken through the device of “three blind certainties”: (1) that engineering is applied science; (2) that engineering is one of the sciences of the artificial; (3) that the advancement of engineering comes from the advancement of science. Simonian vocabulary is a stepping-stone for these three blind certainties. Koen offers a Rortyan redescription that redefines the possibilities of our understanding of engineering, proposing a vocabulary of his own to expose these certainties. Van Aken qualifies, but reaffirms these certainties, refining Simonian vocabulary to broaden its reach in support of an agenda for design research. As Koen is rarely perceived in this light, some final remarks clarify his relevance, and then the dialogues between Simon and Koen, and Simon and van Aken are adjudicated.

Cultural Gastronomic Traditions from the city of Rio de Janeiro - Brazil

This article discusses how Rio de Janeiro’s gastronomic identity was formed upon a blending of European, indigenous and African cooking traditions. Following the transfer of the Portuguese Empire’s capital to Rio, in the break the XIX century, the city’s urban life was greatly impacted as the city saw a surge in the slave trade and immigration, in addition to the Portuguese Court’s presence. Consequently, food and eating habits were substantially influenced by the city’s new life, which involved a clear duality of the aristocratic and popular segments of society. French painter Jean Baptiste Debret accounts for masterly portraying the urban life of Rio, especially regarding its slavery social injustice and how it deeply influenced the city’s life. If food is indeed an important variable for understanding cultural traditions, Rio’s gastronomy reflects historical experiences that translate Rio’s soul to the present. The article is a case study based on bibliographic research of the Brazilian gastronomic formation.

Coproduced game-changing in transformative social innovation: reconnecting the “broken city” of Rio de Janeiro

Social innovation is gaining attention for its potential for system transformations. It is often initiated by grassroots collectives, which can become successful through support from other actors and through certain game-changing events or developments. We highlight how transformative social innovation is a highly dispersed, coproduced process of changing social relations. This coproduction is unfolded through a case of interacting interventions in the socio-spatial structure of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Frequently referred to as a “broken city,” the city suffers from various social challenges related to the socio-spatial cleavages between the welldeveloped and the marginalized areas, the favelas. Following a nested-case approach, we describe two policy measures and three social innovation initiatives intended to reconnect the broken city. We analyze their effects as well as their various interactions. The findings give reasons for considering the policy measures as “game-changers” that allow new courses of play. Still, the key observation about these intertwined socio-spatial interventions is that the broken city is undergoing more dispersed game-changing. Further observing how the reconnections constitute different kinds of changing mobility, we conclude with reflections on mobility-related game-changing.

Entrepreneurship in Rocinha: A Non Goal-Driven Activity

Analysing the behaviour of entrepreneurs from low income regions we noticed that their entrepreneurial actions do not follow traditional prescriptions. Despite of that, a solid entrepreneurial activity is found on those communities, such as Rocinha, one of the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, and keeps a success rate above expectation.